Wednesday, April 18, 2018

"Researchers Map Seven Years of Arctic Shipping"

When the next generation of icebreakers come into service it is going to get crowded up there.
From gCaptain:

The Arctic’s declining sea ice has meant more opportunities for the
shipping industry to expand its use of the region that in decades past
was unnavigable for the vast majority of the year.

The Northwest Passage through Canada and the Northern Sea Route, or
Northeast Passage, north of Russia and Siberia, are both valued because
they could significantly shorten ship transit times between Asia,
Europe, and North America.

To illustrate this increase in ship activity in the Arctic, a team of scientists
has banded together to analyze and map more than 120 million data
points in order to track where ships are most using the region.

To make the map, the team, led by Paul Arthur Berkman, director of
the science diplomacy center at Tufts University, and Greg Fiske, a
geospatial analyst at the Woods Hole Research Center, used data compiled
by SpaceQuest, a company designs microsatellites that can monitor the
track Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals from ships.

Once the data was plotted, there were some interesting observations to be made.

Looking at the data, Berkman, Fiske, and their colleagues found that
the mean center of shipping activity moved 300 kilometers north and
east—closer to the North Pole—over the 7-year span.

Notably, they were particularly surprised to find more small ships,
such as fishing boats, wading farther into Arctic waters. The team also
plotted the AIS ship tracks against sea ice data from NSIDC and found
that ships are encountering ice more often and doing so farther north
each year....MORE

I mention the icebreakers because both sea ice extent and sea ice thickness seem to have been increasing the last 3-4 years. Combine the two and you get sea ice volume and that has also been rising off the lows.
In the maps below note in particular the thickness along the right side, the Russian Northern Sea Route: